Northern India

Northern India’s floor art is the tradition’s most explicitly ceremonial branch: designs that are not the backdrop to an occasion but its first act. The hills answer with Kumaon’s aipan — white rice paste on red geru ground, organised into named chowki compositions each tied to a specific rite — and the plains with chowk poorana, courtyard designs built outward from the centre where the ceremony’s lamps and vessels will stand. A third art, the Braj region’s sanjhi, cuts its images into paper stencils and dusts colour through the openings. The member essays below treat each. The idea they share — that preparing ground is the ceremony beginning — is the chapter’s thread, and its philosophical statement is The Threshold; the family-wide comparison sits in One Idea, Many Languages.